Satan Says

45th Anniversary Edition

Satan Says is both a lighthouse and a box of shadows. It is more than a book; it is the original mother plant where all the seeds have come from. Brave and brilliant, Satan Says changes everyone who reads it. It is a permission slip to be free, made in the shape of a poem. No one has ever been the same.

Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States and author of The Hurting Kind

Hardcover $25.00

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A Stunning 45th Anniversary Release of Sharon Olds’s Satan Says in a Deluxe Hardcover Edition for Fans of Olds’s Poetry, All Poetry Enthusiasts, and Collectors Alike

This 45th anniversary hardcover deluxe edition of the bestselling debut collection of poetry by Sharon Olds now includes an introduction by Diane Seuss. Satan Says was originally published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1980 and received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. The dust-jacketed cloth has spot varnish embellishments, while the vibrant red cloth case contains decorative black pigment stamping on the spine and front cover.

More Praise

Satan Says enlarged our vision of our own lives and gave us a magnifying lens through which we could reexamine our own fears, pleasures, and victories. It changed our thinking. It changed our language. Sharon Olds moved American poetry fifty years closer to our bodies and our hearts.

Toi Derricotte, author of I: New and Selected Poems

Satan Says is the single most earth-shattering book of my writing life. With the words, ‘I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,’ Sharon Olds busted down the walls of the white male poetry mafia. They labeled her ‘confessional,’ and I felt her brilliant courage through my body. When I think of Olds writing this astonishing book in 1980, who am I to be afraid?

Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping

In Satan Says, Sharon Olds peels language down to its red, thudding heart. Olds gives us heat, shadow, and the strange, sweet bloom of daring the body to speak its truths.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

When I moved back to California in 2006 to begin teaching in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, my office was just steps away from the Poetry Center. ‘These are the folks who saw the genius of Satan Says,’ I thought, and I remember visiting the Poetry Center to sit in their comfy chairs and re-read this remarkable book by Sharon Olds. So direct and honest and unflinching it never fails to take my breath away, Satan Says was one of the first grown-up books of poetry I ever loved.

Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

It is hard to state the importance of this book to me as a poet. It not only shows me what can be said in a poem, but it shows me how one might go about saying it, how one might live in the difficult spaces necessary for speaking truth to power. Diane Seuss’s introduction reinforces the enduring importance of Satan Says in our divisive, contemporary moment.

Aaron Smith, author of Stop Lying

In Satan Says, Sharon Olds convincingly, and with astonishing vigor, presents a world which, if not always hostile, is never clear about which face it will show her.

American Book Review

The poems are constructed with craft and care; the volatility of childhood seemingly is tempered with controlled retrospection and craft. . . . Olds's voice is original. It is even savage at times, but always controlled. Recommended for all colleges and libraries.

Choice Reviews

Sharon Olds's poetry has the intensity and power to move the reader, whether her subject be personal family life or political events.

American Poetry Review

This is a powerful and impressive first book.

Booklist

112 Pages, 5.5 x 8 in.

September, 2025

isbn : 9780822948971

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

Poetry / American / General

about the author

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Balladz (2022), a finalist for the National Book Award, Arias (2019), short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, Odes (2016) and Stag’s Leap (2012), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Her other honors include the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living (1983), which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. The Father (1992) was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room (2002) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City.

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